“That was an interesting case,” I said. “I think we finally got everybody put back together right, but when we first stacked up all those arms and legs, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to.”
Williams was safe now, I guessed, so I cut the small talk. “What can I do for you, Sheriff? Your deputy here said it was mighty important, but he didn’t say what it was.”
“There’s a body I need you to look at.”
“I kinda figured that. Is it in the morgue?”
“Morgue?” He snorted. “Doc, the closest thing we got to a morgue up here’s the walk-in beer cooler at the Git-’N’-Go.” He and Williams shared a laugh at the image of a body laid out atop cases of Bud Light. “The body’s still where we found it at yesterday.”
The look of alarm on my face made him smile. “Don’t you worry — another twenty-four hours in that place ain’t gonna hurt it none.” He winked across me at Williams, and Williams laughed again, this time not so much at what Kitchings had said as at what he hadn’t said. Williams laughed with the relief of a child who’d come home from school expecting a whipping and gotten a cookie instead. At that, I smiled, too.
CHAPTER 3
“Okay, boys, saddle up and move out.” Kitchings swung a leg over his mount, and Williams and I did the same. I hit the ATV’s starter button and the Honda engine purred to life. They’d offered me a choice: double up with Williams or ride solo. I’d ridden with Williams once today, and I hadn’t much liked it, so I opted for a machine of my own.
I had never driven an all-terrain vehicle before, but I’d seen kids tearing along highway shoulders and across fields on them, so I figured there couldn’t be much to it. There wasn’t, at least on flat ground. The throttle was a lever on the right handgrip that you pushed with your thumb, just like the Honda jet ski I rode once at a colleague’s lake house on Fort Nasty.
The sheriff’s ATV had a hand brake for the front wheels and a foot brake for the rear — just like the English three-speed bike I pedaled to campus back during my own graduate student days. So far, so good. The gearshift was an oddly placed pair of buttons on the left handgrip — my first few shifts lurched comically — but after a few uneventful laps of the courthouse parking lot, the sheriff seemed satisfied that I’d make it back in one piece from wherever it was we were headed.
The serpentine road we’d taken into Jonesport was a superhighway compared to the track we followed out of it. It started out as a lane of gravel, turning off the highway a half-mile south of town. The first time we crossed the river, we did so on a sagging wooden bridge. The next four times — or was it five? — that we forded it, the current piled up against the balloon tires of the ATVs. Before long the single lane of gravel gave way to a pair of parallel ruts, and soon those turned into a single muddy gully. Our progress, as we lurched and fishtailed upward, was excruciatingly slow — which was the only thing that kept me from getting sick again. The ATV had seemed simple to handle on the road. On the trail, it was a whole different beast. Keeping my balance and maintaining control required half-sitting, half-crouching, in a posture that I could tell was going to send my academician’s thighs and buttocks into fits of agony. But every time Kitchings and Williams looked back to see how I was faring, I gave a quick thumbs-up, trying not to look completely clumsy and panic-stricken as I made my grab for the handlebars again.
Gradually a limestone cliff reared out of the mountainside, and the trail, such as it was, edged close to its base, at times running beneath overhangs framed by towering hemlocks and glossy rhododendrons. At one such overhang the officers slowed, turned toward a cleft in the rock face…and then plunged into the bowels of the earth. I sucked in my breath, gritted my teeth, and plunged in after them. Okay, I didn’t actually plunge — crept, more like it — but I fol lowed. The key point is, I followed, finding the switch for the headlamp just as the last glimmer of daylight dwindled behind me.
The floor was surprisingly smooth and level — dry sand in some places, packed mud in others. The headlights of the ATVs fell away into nothingness, which told me we were in a huge subterranean chamber, the blackness so thick you could almost touch it. Then, after a distance that I had no way of estimating, glistening walls began closing in upon us, and we entered the bed of a subterranean stream. It was a foot deep, perhaps six feet wide, and straight as an arrow, following some precise crease in the layers of bedrock. When the passage widened again, Kitchings and Williams turned the vehicles up out of the streambed and stopped. They killed their engines and cut the lights, so I did the same, and we sat in utter darkness.
No one said a word. The water gurgled softly past. My ears adjusted to the quiet, as my eyes might have adjusted to dim light, had there been a single photon to latch on to. Gradually I began to hear another sound underneath the stream’s noise, a sound that was musical, haunting, and human: unmistakably, I heard the laughter of small children.
“Do you hear…?” I began, but I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the question.
“The kids. Yeah.” It was Kitchings. “Spooky, huh? I’ve been told two different things by people who know this cave. One is that it’s just some weird echo from the stream. The other is that it’s the spirits of Indian children.”
He must have sensed my confusion, because he continued, “This cave is on land that was sacred to five separate tribes. Even when they were at war, they could mingle here in peace. Powerful magic, they say. When I’m out in the daylight, I believe in the science. When I’m in here in the dark, I believe in the spirits.”
He flipped on a flashlight, and when he did, the laughter died in midnote. Opening a cargo box bolted to the rear of the ATV, he fished out three powerful lanterns and a jacket that read “D.E.A.” in big letters across the back. “Here, you better put on this heirloom drug-bust jacket, Doc; you’re liable to catch pneumonia in here.” I waved it off, but he handed it to me anyhow. “I’d hate to be remembered as the sheriff who killed Dr. Brockton,” he said. As I put it on, I realized I was already shivering.
We trudged up the side of a sloping basin, ducked into a side tunnel, and soon emerged into another chamber. The rest of the cavern had been a dull grayish-brown, but these walls sparkled — practically blazed — with the fire of millions of crystals. Quartz, I guessed, though they seemed as brilliant as diamonds. A mammoth stalagmite, also sheathed in crystals, filled one side of the chamber.
A narrow cleft separated the stalagmite from the wall. Kitchings nodded toward the crevice and played his light over the opening in a go-here sort of way. I edged my way in. It was a tight fit — I wondered how the sheriff had wrangled his beer belly through it — but then it opened up into a small, glittering grotto. Laid out on a rock shelf along one side was a body — the most remarkable human corpse I’d ever seen. I stared, and blinked, and stared again.
The sheriff had been right. A day — or a month, or even a year — would have wrought little change in the striking corpse laid out on a rock shelf in that glittering grotto.
I had seen adipocere many times before. The term is Latin; it translates literally as “grave wax,” and that pretty much sums up what it is and where it’s found: a greasy, tallowlike material that forms when fatty flesh decomposes in a damp environment. Bodies buried in damp basements or crawl spaces under houses often have adipocere on them; so do floaters — bodies found in Tennessee’s abundant lakes and rivers — with most of the adipocere centered along the floater’s waterline. But the dozens of basement bodies and floaters I’d seen bore scant resemblance to the specimen laid out on the stone ledge before me. At first glance the corpse had appeared shrouded in adipocere, but as I studied it, I realized that what I was seeing wasn’t a surface coating, but something much rarer. The body’s soft tissues had been completely transformed into adipocere — almost as if Madame Tussaud had placed a waxen mummy here as a private exhibit for me alone. The clothing had apparently crumbled away, its residue incorporated into a dark layer that began at the corpse’s neck and continued all the way down to the rotting leather at the soles of the feet.